• • •
At long last summer approached, promising freedom from schoolwork for the children and a welcome escape to The Farm for Mary Ann. Since Junius and Edwin were away fulfilling his last obligations of the theatre season, when Mary Ann was asked to attend a picnic at Milton Academy to celebrate the end of John Wilkes’s school year, she invited Asia to accompany her.
They set out early in the morning, Mary Ann attired in a lovely pale gray gown and a hat adorned with lilacs, Asia wearing her best white dress and a bonnet adorned with daisies. The train carried them to Cockeysville, where they and several other parents and visitors continued on by wagon to Milton Academy. The wagon rumbled along over rocks and tree roots through a dense woodland of tall trees and thick underbrush until they reached a broad, uneven clearing. Several neat, sturdy buildings of stone and oak stood on the far edge, and as they approached the largest, Mary Ann saw that long tables were arranged in rows before it, and three hundred or so students and guests mingled nearby.
As two young Quaker men helped the ladies down from the wagon, Mary Ann glimpsed her son among the crowd of boys who had sauntered over to welcome the newcomers. “Wilkes,” Asia cried, laughing from joy at the sight of his warm, familiar smile. He looked well, so happy and strong that Mary Ann’s heart nearly burst from gladness.
Soon thereafter, faculty, students, and guests seated themselves at the long tables, making no distinction of rank or place, and enjoyed generous portions of delicious, wholesome, simple fare. After the meal, the headmaster led them to a sunny clearing around the north end of the main building, where a stage had been erected for student recitations. The audience was nearly put to sleep by a young boy stammering out a Wordsworth poem, only to be spellbound moments later by a lad of about twelve years of age who delivered a remarkably stirring soliloquy from Othello.
“He’s quite good,” Mary Ann whispered to John Wilkes, seated beside her, her gaze fixed on the performer. “He has an excellent voice and a commanding stage presence, don’t you agree?”
When John Wilkes did not reply, Mary Ann glanced his way to find him nodding nervously, his face pale. Before she could ask him if he was ill, he bolted to his feet and strode to the foot of the stairs leading up to the stage, awaiting his cue.
Asia muffled a gasp and seized her mother’s hand. John Wilkes had not told them he intended to perform. They both forgot to applaud as the young Othello bowed deeply several times before ceding the stage to John Wilkes.
He flew up the stairs and burst upon the stage in a fury. “I say my daughter is my flesh and blood,” he declared, trembling with Shylock’s anger and despondency. Nearby, a tutor read out the lines of Salarino, Tubal, and the servant, but John Wilkes alone commanded the stage, bringing to life the old Jewish merchant’s storm of passion, his ebb of despair, his wild rejoicing.
Mary Ann watched him, enthralled. A stunned, awestruck silence followed his exit, but a thunderous crash of applause quickly shattered it. John Wilkes was called back upon the stage, smiling and blushing, to bow again and again.
“Who is this young player?” queried an elderly Quakeress seated on Asia’s other side as John Wilkes took one last bow and quit the stage. “Does thee know his name? He is a comely youth.”
“He’s my brother,” Asia replied proudly as the applause faded and another pupil took the stage, his expression frightened and wary. He would be a difficult act to follow, as Junius might have said had he been there. He would not have objected to his son’s taking the stage for a simple school recitation, Mary Ann told herself, hoping it was true. He had lifted the prohibition for June and Edwin, after all, and John Wilkes had acquitted himself well.
Suddenly a motion in the corner of her eye drew her attention, and she glanced over to discover John Wilkes crouched low behind his sister, tugging on her sleeve. “Slip away from ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and meet me over there in the hollow,” he murmured, grinning mischievously. “I’ve something to tell.”
He darted off, and with an apologetic, imploring look for their mother, Asia swiftly followed.
“John, Asia,” Mary Ann whispered sharply, drawing disapproving stares from those seated nearby. When her children neither halted nor replied, she muffled a sigh and went after them, murmuring apologies to the spectators whose view she obstructed in passing.
She walked quickly, but John Wilkes and Asia easily outpaced her, and the sounds of the ongoing performance faded behind her as she hastened after them through a stand of trees. It broke open upon a shady hollow, where she discovered John Wilkes sprawled out upon the soft, thick grass, gazing up at the sky through the branches high overhead. “Sis,” he exclaimed when Asia reached him, and as she caught her breath, he took her hand and tugged playfully, pulling her to a seat beside him. “I have a curious tale to share.”
A strange note in his voice compelled Mary Ann to halt rather than join her children in the clearing. Instead she concealed herself in the shadows of the trees, straining her ears to listen.
“Tell me all,” she heard Asia demand, with mock seriousness. “Leave out no detail.”
Grinning, John Wilkes leaned his head back against her knees and dug into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. “A band of gypsies has been prowling hereabouts, and one of them told me my fortune.”
“What did she say?” Asia teased, trying in vain to snatch the paper from his grasp. “That you’ll find your heart’s desire? That fame and fortune will be yours? Or perhaps she gave you the answers to your history exam?”
“Nothing so good as that.” Still grinning, John Wilkes unfolded the paper. “I wrote it down, but there was no need, because it was so bad I won’t soon forget it.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged, nonchalant, or making a good pretense of it. “She studied my palm and saw only ill fortune.” Glancing at the paper, he cleared his throat and spoke in the voice of an old crone. “‘Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all crisscross. It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. Trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts; they’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young, and leave many to mourn you, many to love you too, but you’ll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. No, young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it, but every word I’ve told is true by the signs. You’d best turn a missionary or a priest and try to escape it.’”
“Why, that’s nonsense, Wilkes,” Asia protested, shuddering. “The proof is in her own words. You have many friends, and no enemies except for those silly boys back home, and they can’t count for much.”
“I guess that’s so,” John Wilkes admitted, slowly refolding the paper. “I asked her, if it’s in the stars or in my hand, how could I escape my fate, even if I did join the clergy?”
“You can’t mean you’d really do that, all because of one old woman’s wild ramblings.”
“Of course not. Me, a minister?” John shook his head. “Afterward I said to her, ‘Do you expect me to pay you for this evil dose?’ Well, she did. She took my money all right, and said she was glad she wasn’t a younger woman, or she’d follow me through the world for my handsome face.”
He laughed merrily, but Asia could barely manage a smile.
Deeply troubled, Mary Ann silently withdrew and returned to her seat in the audience, where she sat through the remaining recitations, brooding over the gypsy’s dark tidings and her own vision of John Wilkes’s future that she had glimpsed in the fire when he was but a babe in her arms.
She imagined the Fates contemplating the tapestry of her son’s destiny—Clotho spinning the thread of his life from distaff to spindle, Lachesis measuring its length, Atropos dispassionately cutting it
, determining the manner and hour of his death. “Be kind,” she implored in a whisper, though she knew the mythical Fates were creatures of imagination and superstition, impervious to her pleas.
She pushed the unsettling image aside, and another swiftly took its place—Junius, declaiming from the stage in the role of Julius Caesar. “‘Men at some time are masters of their fates,’” she murmured, remembering. “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’”
Whether Shakespeare had intended to encourage or to warn, she could not say.
• • •
At long last, Adelaide’s required period of residency was completed. She promptly sued Junius for divorce, whipping up a new frenzy in the press. Junius did not contest her suit, and before long the matter was settled, and the decades-long sham of a marriage was over.
Soon thereafter, Junius asked Mary Ann to marry him.
She was startled by how intensely his proposal pleased her, and yet, despite her certainty that he loved her dearly, something held her back. “After thirty years, you would ask me to submit to—what did you call it back in London? The iron yoke of marriage?”
He took her hands. “We will submit to it together, for the children’s sake.”
With great effort, she refrained from noting that the yoke lay lighter upon his shoulders than hers. She had given him a peaceful home, adoring children, the work of her hands, her beauty, her life. He had given her love and passion and fidelity, but also innumerable hours of worry and immeasurable anxiety. For his sake she had broken with her parents, betrayed her faith, ruined her good name—and yet without Junius, her world would have been constrained to a few city blocks of London, circumscribed by her home, her church, the flower shop, the Covent Garden market. She might never have known what it was like to be truly, completely, ardently loved, to live the sort of passion other people only read about in Byron’s poetry. Her darling children would not have existed, and she could not imagine life without them. Nor could she imagine living without Junius—but it seemed impossible that they could continue on as they had done, now that no impediment stood between them and lawful marriage. The public had a long memory for scandal, and with each passing year, the burden of the choices she and Junius had made would grow heavier upon their children’s shoulders, more bewildering, more unfair.
And so Mary Ann accepted Junius’s proposal.
They married on the tenth day of May 1851, John Wilkes’s thirteenth birthday. “At last we are respectable,” Mary Ann told her husband wryly as they walked home from the courthouse, her gloved hand on his arm. Earlier that morning he had declared that she was as beautiful as on the day they first met, and she had laughed, well aware that love altered his perception. Though hard toil and care had kept her from growing stout, she had lost her girlish grace and her once glossy black hair had faded. Worry and contemplation had marked her brow with a pair of indelible lines, with finer ones etched in the corners of her eyes and mouth. For his part Junius had grown a trifle stockier, and drink and dissipation had marred his noble face with fine red veins and bags beneath his eyes, but his gaze was as piercing and expressive as before, and she found him no less handsome. If anything, she found him more beautiful and loved him all the more for knowing his faults and how valiantly he fought to overcome them.
Later that evening, John Wilkes found her alone in the garden, lost in thought, her gaze fixed on the wedding band Junius had slipped onto her finger only a few hours before. His arms were rigid by his sides, his hands balled into fists, his jaw set, his eyes flaring with anger and triumph.
“Now I am a Booth,” he said emphatically, but she was his mother, and she heard the lingering question in his voice.
“Yes, darling boy, you are,” she said, holding out her arms to him, drawing him into her embrace. “You are John Wilkes Booth, and let no one deny it.”
CHAPTER TWO
ASIA
1851–1864
Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,
Who covers faults at last with shame derides.
—William Shakespeare,
King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1
Although her parents had insisted that nothing would change after they were legally wed, it seemed to Asia that a heavy burden had been lifted from her mother’s shoulders, and Father became exultant, even triumphant. Declaring that the Booth family had entered a joyous new era, he resolved to build them a beautiful new residence in the Gothic style on The Farm, and he immediately hired James Johnson Gifford, the architect of the Holliday Street Theatre, to supervise the construction. Asia and her siblings marveled at the artist’s renderings of the elegant two-story, eight-room cottage in the shape of a cross, which boasted a massive central chimney, a broad front portico, steeply pitched gables, and diamond-pane windows.
“That’s the room I want for myself,” Wilkes announced one afternoon as he and Asia spread out the plans on the dining-room floor and studied them while Mother and Rosalie set the table for supper. He pointed to a bedchamber on the second floor, and with his arm extended, the cuff of his sleeve shifted to reveal fine black markings like spindly veins on the back of his left hand.
“Wilkes, what did you do?” Asia whispered, seizing his hand. Halfheartedly he tried to pull away, but she held fast, muffling a gasp when she discovered the initials JWB surrounded by a wreath of stars crudely pricked into his fine, smooth skin with India ink. “Wilkes, a tattoo? What were you thinking?”
Wilkes extricated himself from her grasp just as Mother glanced questioningly their way. In unison the brother and sister lowered their gazes to the plans, but as soon as Mother resumed her work, Wilkes whispered, “I’m a true son of Junius Brutus Booth, and I want everyone to know it. I’m no bastard. I’m as good as anyone. That’s what I was thinking.”
Often thereafter, Asia spotted him rubbing his right thumb absently over his homemade tattoo, as if reassuring himself that the initials were indeed his by right.
Whenever Mother murmured about the rising construction expenses, Father quieted her with kisses and declared, “My dear wife must have a home befitting our great love.” That never failed to bring a soft brightness to her eyes and roses to her cheeks, and she confided to Asia that she would be glad to move up from the old log cabin that had come with the property, for the family had outgrown it long ago. Father invited Joe and Ann Hall, their faithful longtime employees, to make the cabin their home, a gift that was gratefully accepted.
Construction on Tudor Hall, as Father had christened the new residence in honor of Henry Tudor, the earl of Richmond and slayer of King Richard III, continued after Wilkes returned to Milton Academy and all through the winter and into the spring. It was not yet complete when June unexpectedly returned to Baltimore.
Mother wept from joy to embrace her eldest child again after three long years, but Asia was so astonished to see her eldest brother that at first she could only stare and wonder. It was unmistakably him—a bit thinner and weathered, and more careful in his speech, but otherwise seeming little changed for his three years in San Francisco. Strikingly handsome at thirty years of age, June had inherited their father’s noble features and Roman profile but none of his dramatic genius, or so Asia had overheard her parents lament. He was an excellent athlete, a powerful boxer, and an impressively skilled swordsman. Those talents had kept him steadily employed as a reliable actor in supporting roles, but it was in management and directing that he excelled.
Mother immediately sent Joseph running to the Holliday Street Theatre to tell Father of his namesake’s return. “My boy! My boy,” Father exclaimed as he burst into the house with Edwin and Joseph on his heels, and tears filled his eyes as he embraced June. “It’s glorious to see you. Why didn’t you send word that you were coming? Have you come home to stay?”
“Why didn’t Miss Harriet Mace accompany you?” Asia inquired, for that was surel
y the most interesting question; no one else would be bold enough to ask about the woman for whom June had abandoned his wife and daughter.
“Asia,” Mother admonished gently.
But June smiled affably, not offended. “I sent you a long letter before I set sail from San Francisco. Didn’t you receive it? I don’t expect to stay more than a fortnight, and that, dear Asia, is why Harriet remained in San Francisco.”
If only Wilkes were there to make the family circle complete, Asia thought wistfully as they gathered around the supper table and June enthralled them with tales of his adventures in far-off California. In the three years he and Harriet had lived in San Francisco, it had transformed from a frontier settlement of a few hundred haphazard shacks in the mud to a thriving city of fifty thousand residents, the population swelled by gold miners, aspiring prospectors, and a great many entrepreneurs eager to part them from their earnings.
“Unless you’ve seen it, you can’t imagine the wealth pouring into San Francisco,” said June. “Fortunes are plucked from streams every day, or earned by merchants peddling picks and shovels and sieves. I’ve seen men buy houses with gold nuggets as big as my thumb.”
Except for gold, June told them, above all things Californians craved entertainment. Many of the first public buildings constructed in San Francisco were theatres, but so few truly talented players performed in the West that those who were willing to leave their comfortable situations in the East for the rustic frontier were appreciated all the more. “Prospectors often throw purses of gold on the stage to reward a player that has particularly pleased them,” June said. “After performances, the cast and crew sweep the stage and divide up the gold dust they gather.”
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